United Nations, July 2: Delivering a sharp and uncompromising message at the United Nations, India has asserted that “a terrorist is a terrorist” and warned the international community against creating distinctions, narratives or political justifications that dilute the global fight against terrorism. Addressing the UN General Assembly during the adoption of the Ninth Review of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS), India said terrorism in all its forms and manifestations must be condemned unequivocally, regardless of grievance, ideology, political cause or strategic calculation.
India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni, said New Delhi’s position has been shaped by decades of suffering from cross-border terrorism, which has left lives destroyed, families traumatised and communities scarred. Speaking in a tone that reflected both frustration and urgency, he said the international community must reject double standards in counter-terrorism and act collectively to root out what he described as the “murderous ideology” of terror.
“India has been a victim of cross-border terrorism for decades. Our people have paid the price of terrorism in lives lost, families scarred, and societies shattered. This experience has shaped India’s approach: there can be no justification for terrorism,” Parvathaneni told the General Assembly. He stressed that terrorism cannot be rationalised by invoking context, political grievances or strategic interests and said member states must ensure that perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of terror are held accountable and brought to justice.
The intervention came during a key review of the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, a framework first adopted in 2006 as the world body’s central policy instrument for coordinating international action against terrorism. The strategy was conceived as a broad consensus document affirming that terrorism is a threat to international peace and security and can only be defeated through sustained cooperation among member states. But India used the latest review to underline what it sees as persistent weaknesses in the global response chief among them the unwillingness of some countries to apply a consistent standard to all forms of terrorism.
“A terrorist is a terrorist,” Parvathaneni said, repeating a line that formed the core of India’s intervention. “We must work hand in hand to root out the murderous ideology without finding any grievance to justify terrorism.” In that formulation lay the heart of India’s argument: that the global counter-terrorism framework risks losing credibility if states continue to distinguish between “good” and “bad” terrorists, or between acts of terror they condemn and acts they choose to explain away for geopolitical reasons.
India’s statement reflected long-standing frustration with what it calls selective approaches to terrorism in multilateral forums. New Delhi has for years argued that certain countries have shielded or excused terror groups for strategic reasons, weakening the credibility of international institutions and blunting collective action. Without naming any specific country in the latest intervention, India made clear that counter-terrorism cannot be hollowed out by politicised narratives, false equivalences or procedural obstruction.
The Indian envoy also drew attention to what he described as the basic moral and legal principle at stake. While acknowledging that the international community must address conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism, he warned against confusing explanation with justification. “We must uphold human rights and the rule of law,” he said, “but we must also recognise that the first human right is the right to life, and terrorism is the most direct assault on this human right.” The formulation was intended to push back against approaches that, in India’s view, place excessive emphasis on contextualising terrorism while failing to foreground the rights of victims and the obligation of states to dismantle terror networks.
A major part of India’s intervention focused on terror financing, an area New Delhi says must remain central to international efforts. India urged member states to improve financial intelligence sharing, strengthen implementation of Financial Action Task Force standards and ensure that no jurisdiction remains a safe conduit for funds used to sustain terrorism. The emphasis was significant because India has repeatedly argued that terror groups survive not only through ideology and recruitment, but through access to money, logistical networks and permissive financial ecosystems that allow them to move resources across borders.
In recent years, global counter-terrorism efforts have increasingly concentrated on cutting off financial pipelines, sanctioning facilitators and tracking the movement of funds through formal and informal channels. India’s call at the UN reflects concern that while legal and institutional tools exist, their enforcement remains uneven. Countries accused of harbouring, tolerating or failing to curb terror financing have often become points of diplomatic friction, and India has consistently pressed for stronger international scrutiny of such jurisdictions.
Another key concern raised by India was the growing misuse of new and emerging technologies by terrorist groups. Parvathaneni said it was “disheartening” that negotiations on the latest review of the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy had failed to arrive at an acceptable outcome on the critical issue of preventing terrorists from accessing technological tools for their operations. This concern is part of a broader shift in counter-terrorism discourse, where the threat landscape is no longer limited to physical training camps, arms networks or traditional propaganda channels.
Today, terrorist organisations and extremist actors can use encrypted communication, drones, digital fundraising, artificial intelligence tools, social media recruitment pipelines and sophisticated online propaganda ecosystems to expand their reach. India has increasingly argued that global counter-terrorism frameworks must adapt to this reality and address the ways in which digital platforms and emerging technologies are being exploited for radicalisation, financing, surveillance and attacks. The Indian envoy’s remarks suggested that New Delhi is dissatisfied with the pace at which the UN system is responding to these changes.
India pointed to its own efforts to push this conversation forward, including the Delhi Declaration on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes and the “No Money for Terror” conferences, both of which New Delhi has promoted as important platforms for international cooperation. In a pointed remark, India criticised the absence of any mention of the Delhi Declaration in the 2023 Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy review, saying it reflected the “unfortunate situation” in which the General Assembly is held hostage to what it described as “petty bean counting.” The phrase indicated India’s irritation not merely with the omission itself but with what it sees as the tendency of multilateral negotiations to become mired in procedural rivalries, symbolic contestation and political point-scoring at the expense of substantive action.
The broader significance of India’s intervention lies in its attempt to revive support for the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT), a long-pending legal instrument first proposed by India in the 1990s. The convention was intended to establish a universally agreed legal framework to define and criminalise terrorism, facilitate extradition and prosecution, and deny safe havens, arms and funding to terror actors and their sponsors. Despite repeated discussions over nearly three decades, the CCIT has remained stalled because member states have been unable to agree on core definitional and political issues.
Parvathaneni told the Assembly that the absence of a universally accepted legal framework continues to hobble collective action against terrorism. He argued that the delay in adopting the CCIT has left normative gaps in international law and weakened the ability of states to cooperate effectively in prosecution, extradition and sanctions enforcement. “Nearly three decades of delay have hindered our collective efforts to combat terrorism,” he said, urging member states to show the political will necessary to conclude the convention.
For India, the CCIT has long represented more than a technical legal project. It is a diplomatic test of whether the international community is prepared to move beyond rhetorical condemnation of terrorism and create a universal, enforceable framework that applies equally to all actors. India’s frustration with the slow progress of the convention reflects a broader view that the global fight against terrorism has too often been fragmented by geopolitical bargaining, selective outrage and disputes over terminology.
That concern also shaped India’s comments on sanctions regimes. Parvathaneni stressed that transparency and objectivity are essential in the way sanctions mechanisms function, especially when it comes to securing listings of terrorists and terror entities based on evidence. The reference appeared to allude to repeated instances in which proposals to list individuals or groups under UN sanctions frameworks have faced delays or blocks for political reasons. India has frequently argued that such obstruction undermines the credibility of the sanctions system and allows known terrorists or their sponsors to exploit diplomatic divisions.
India’s remarks at the UN were not limited to hard security concerns. The country also reiterated its position that it condemns all acts motivated by prejudice against any faith or identity, including those driven by Islamophobia, Christianphobia, antisemitism or hostility towards other religions, ethnicities, nationalities or racial groups. Parvathaneni said that because the United Nations is a universal multilateral forum, its lens too must be universal. While condemning acts motivated by hatred against Muslims, Christians and Jews, he said the Assembly must also recognise that similar prejudice extends to other faiths as well.
This portion of the speech was notable because it sought to place India’s counter-terrorism message within a broader framework of equal treatment and universal principle. By arguing that all forms of religious hatred should be condemned, India attempted to reinforce its claim that multilateral responses must avoid selectivity not only in defining terrorism, but also in recognising the forms of prejudice and violence that fuel division.
Still, the dominant message of India’s intervention remained unmistakably focused on the politics of counter-terrorism. Parvathaneni warned that the success of global efforts against terrorism depends on whether the international community can summon the political will to confront the threat in all its manifestations without resorting to double standards. “Only if there are no distinctions between good and bad terrorists,” he said, can the menace of terrorism be effectively combated.
That formulation reflects a familiar Indian complaint: that global counter-terrorism architecture often becomes hostage to the strategic interests of powerful states, with some forms of terrorism condemned swiftly while others are tolerated, instrumentalised or ignored. India has repeatedly insisted that such selectivity is not only morally untenable but operationally dangerous, because it allows extremist ecosystems to survive and adapt under the protection of political ambiguity.
The timing of India’s remarks is significant in a world where terrorism has evolved in both form and geography. Traditional jihadist organisations remain active in several regions, but the threat matrix has broadened to include lone-wolf radicalisation, digitally networked extremist communities, cross border financing structures and the use of emerging technologies to recruit, fund and plan attacks. At the same time, geopolitical tensions have complicated international cooperation, with rivalries among major powers often spilling into multilateral institutions and weakening consensus on security issues.
In that environment, India’s speech was both a warning and a diplomatic demand. It warned that terrorism remains a direct assault on the right to life and a continuing threat to international peace. But it also demanded that the UN system and its member states move beyond symbolic commitments and confront the political evasions that, in India’s view, continue to cripple global action.
Whether India’s call will translate into stronger consensus on issues such as terror financing, sanctions reform, technology misuse or the CCIT remains uncertain. The history of multilateral negotiations on terrorism is littered with declarations of intent that failed to overcome deeper geopolitical divides. Yet India’s intervention serves as a reminder that for countries that have borne the human cost of terrorism over decades, the debate is not abstract. It is about whether the international system is prepared to treat terrorism as a universal crime rather than a selectively applied label.
As the General Assembly completed the ninth review of the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, India’s message cut through the procedural language of diplomacy with unusual bluntness. Terrorism, it said, cannot be sanitised by political vocabulary, contextual excuses or strategic convenience. A terrorist is a terrorist. And until the world acts on that principle without hesitation, inconsistency or compromise, the global fight against terror will remain incomplete.